U.S. taxpayers likely lost $1.3 billion in the government bailout of Chrysler, the Treasury Department announced Thursday.
The government recently sold its remaining 6% stake in the company to Italian automaker Fiat, wrapping up the 2009 auto bailouts that were part of TARP.
Fiat paid the Treasury a total of $560 million for the remaining shares, as well as rights to shares held by the United Auto Workers retiree trust.
Originally, the government committed a total of $12.5 billion to the struggling automaker, Old Chrysler, and the company's newly formed Chrysler Group. Of those funds, $11.2 billion has been returned through principal repayments, interest and cancelled commitments, the Treasury said. The new Chrysler Group paid back $5.1 billion in loans in May.
Even though that means $1.3 billion will not be recovered from the bankrupt Old Chrysler, the Treasury called it a "major accomplishment." Heaven help us from any more Major Accomplishments. All this did was bribe the union bosses and didn't fix a damn thing.
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Shareholders lost everything and bondholders lost most of their investment that they would have recovered in bankruptcy court. The Unions and Fiat made out like bandits.
What's that term when government, unions and industry collude to run things? Oh yeah, Fascism. No wonder Fiat was so fired up to take over Chrysler.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.